[Mailman-Developers] Login / User Identification Issues in MM3

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Jul 11, 2012, at 1:55 AM, Terri Oda wrote:
> *  We'd also like to do openid, which means we need to somehow associate an openid token with an email address.
> 
> So right now, postorius needs email address, username (for direct authentication), and potentially a list of openid or other tokens.  That's a small enough list that we may be able to justify making mailman core aware of a small token list (or a single openid token?), or we can let postorius handle that and have core only understand "I am the owner of this email address -- let me see the associated settings of me."  I think my preference would be to have mailman understand more than email/password authentication, because I think it'll make things easier and not have us duplicating data in hyperkitty etc, though.

> The messy part, IMO, is what to do with the non-authentication user data. I'm guessing we'll probably want some sort of theme preference data (possibly shared between postorius/hyperkitty/others?).  Not sure what else.  That stuff... really doesn't have much place in core, but probably will need to be shared between several web components... do we have a second rest server for user data?

If we are going to use REST interfaces to tie components together, then, in the design, we should do a few things differently.

First, we should define all of the data storage in terms of the REST access points to the data. (And not, as presently done, the other way around)
Next, we should access all of the REST interface URLs indirectly so that functionality can be moved around simply by changing a single reference definition.  This is the kind of scheme that django uses with its {% url %} tag. (like DNS vs IP addresses)
Finally, we should "black box encapsulate" the access to the data, requiring that EVERY module utilize this common interface, and only this interface, to the data.